Nine Layers of Sky by Liz Williams

walked down Furmanova and found that Lenin had gone. His pedestal was empty; he’d simply disappeared. It seemed ironic that he and his successors had caused so many people to vanish without a trace, and now it was happening to him.
    A week later, Elena had walked back the same way and found another statue in his place: a scowling warrior on a prancing horse, with a bow in his hand. All over the city, the old faces were being spirited away and even older faces were replacing them: Tamerlane and Abai and Genghis. Elena was glad that they hadn’t just thrown Lenin on the scrap heap. Through the trees, they could see other Lenins, endlessly repeated, a graveyard to Communism. Gulnara and Elena stared at them in silence, and then walked on.
    The silence grew, and then Gulnara said, with a curiously diffident hostility, “It’s not just Atyrom. All the Russians seem to be leaving, too. The Kazakhs don’t want us anymore.” She gave an angry sniff. “But we’ve given them everything. If it wasn’t for us, they’d still be herding camels and living in yurts. Ungrateful bunch . . .”
    There it was again, the lightning twist and spin across the ethnic divide, but Elena said nothing. Revision of history and culture was the old Soviet specialty, remaking dreams to fit the grim reality rather than the other way around. Gulnara had a Kazakh mother, a Kazakh name, and Uzbek relatives, but she still thought of herself as a Soviet citizen. Whereas Elena’s people, Russian colonists, had put Gulnara’s ancestors to death not so long ago, and poisoned their lands with dumping grounds for radioactive waste and cosmodromes and concentration camps for Chechens. The Kazakhs had no reason to be grateful. This new phoenix republic belonged to them now, and where did the Russians fit in? Where did anyone? Her thoughts were once more running down a familiar and depressing track.
    “I hear you’re leaving Almaty, too,” Gulnara said.
    “Who told you that?”
    “Your sister. I saw her in the Business Club on Friday.”
    Elena frowned. “What was Anna doing in the Business Club?”
    “Same as everyone else. Dancing, listening to music. She introduced me to her boyfriend. He seems nice, doesn’t he? For a German.”
    Elena said nothing. If Anna had a German boyfriend, this was the first she had heard of it. Usually she and her sister told each other everything. She wasn’t going to say so in front of Gulnara, however. Stifling a twinge of betrayal, she muttered something noncommittal.
    “So where are you going to go?” Gulnara asked.
    “Canada,” Elena said firmly. The more she talked about it, the more real it seemed.
    “Have you got visas?”
    “Not yet. We’re going to get them in Moscow.”
    “I heard it was difficult to get a visa these days. Too many people wanting to get out.”
    “We’ll manage.”
    “Do you have a job lined up?”
    “No. But I’ll find something. I’m well-qualified, and so is Anna.”
    “I might write to the embassy myself,” Gulnara said. She looked around Gorky Park, at the derelict children’s playground with its fading cartoon murals and rusted swings. Her mouth turned downward. “Look at it. Nobody cares. It’s not like that in the West.”
    Elena felt a sudden surge of resentment that, given the dream of Canada, took her completely by surprise.
    “How do you know? You’ve never been there. Sveta Dubrovina went to the States and didn’t like it. She said no one knew who their neighbors were, and when she went into the supermarket she couldn’t make up her mind what to buy; there was so much stuff that no one needed . . .”
    Gulnara’s mouth was open. “But
you’re
planning to go there.”
    “I know.” Elena sighed. “It’s just that—I wanted something better for us
here.
”
I wanted my “beloved
work,” as we used to say, but there’s no chance of that now.
    “Oh,
here.
” Gulnara grimaced. “There’s nothing here. There never has been.”
    “That’s not true.